Ye Olde Automated 16TB Windows Azure Virtual Machine demo

Thanks to various colleagues (Ori Amiga and Michael Washam) demonstrating this to me many months ago, I thought I would document how to create your own Virtual Machine (VM) on Windows Azure with 16 TB on demand, re-use it and then cleanup.

This demo should take you no more than 20 minutes from start to finish.

Now you can re-login to your virtual machine, go to disk management and re add your disks by right clicking and selecting Import Foreign Disks

As a developer I think this feature of moving around machines and large amounts of data, whilst maintaining state and data integrity is, simply, awesome.

F> DISK CLEANUP

Ok, you just cleaned up the virtual machines, disks and service deployments but, by design you didn't really cleanup the disks. I could have included that in one script BUT I wanted to make sure of a couple of things. First, that the disks (OS and data) can be reattached very easily, regardless of removing the service and virtual machine. Second that if you did save data to those disks that you were not going to lose it!

So with those caveats aside, this script will remove the disks! (based on a size of 1000) and you are back to the demo start state.